Sounds like 90% of their employees will be working an extra 10% more hours per week
Taken straight from the ULA playbook!
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SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce
181–190 of 557 posts
Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce
#182They've proven that they can make reusable rocket. In the early days they had around 6 launches per year requiring six separate rockets. Now they're hitting 20-25 launches per year and can carry an even larger payload on each launch. But they claim to be able to fly each rocket ten times before needing to make a new one. So you're going from 6 new rockets per year to 2 new rockets per year. Also rockets are not like…
Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design: 39. (alternate formulation) The three keys to keeping a new human space program affordable and on schedule: 1) No new launch vehicles. 2) No new launch vehicles. 3) Whatever you do, don't develop any new launch vehicles. I'll admit it does say human space program but it doesn't specify where the humans are. https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html
Sounds to be as much of a fundamental law of the universe as Moore's law.
Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whatever the reasons for the workforce reduction, this way of doing it is just unnecessarily cruel.
I disagree. What would be more cruel is to keep people guessing for weeks, or to do several smaller layoffs. That's how it's usually done, and it utterly decimates the morale, and causes the best people to leave. The best way to do a layoff is to cut once, cut deep, and do it quickly. And of course to not be an asshole and offer severance compensation to folks who were laid off.
I worked at a company that did layoffs. They basically sequestered everyone in there work areas, killed Internet access so people couldn't go online (pre smartphones), and walked people out one at a time. It was pretry lame.
Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
10% is huge by any measure.
By that logic no company with less than 11 people should ever fire anyone...
Pretty much, yeah. In an 11 person company, each individual is basically a whole department. That one person might be your only marketer, or your only frontend developer, or your only accountant. That's a really big deal.
Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe, maybe not. Consider it in terms of your own workplace: if you worked on a team of 10, and one person got laid off, would that seem so huge? I think the question is whether this round of layoffs is in response to an acute cash flow issue or just part of long-term financial prudency. They fact that they waited until after Christmas and are providing 8 weeks of pay and benefits makes me hopeful that it's the latt…
10% is huge by any measure.
Really? Look around you next time you're in the office, could you really not lose at least 1 of those 9 slackers around you?
Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except keeping people around for two weeks longer allows people to say goodbye to their coworkers and people they might've worked with for years. It allows them to impart their knowledge to anyone else that might need it, document things that need documenting and more importantly: It means the company treats you like an actual human being. Acting like people are just gonna sit around and mope is not only highly disin…
They launch giant multi million dollar missiles into space. Allowing an employee that knows they are terminated and is most likely distracted to continue working on a project like that is not worth the risk. If someone was genuinely upset and wanted revenge, a good portion of them are literally rocket scientists, they could probably figure out a way to do it if given a couple weeks. Better just to cut ties as quickly…
I don't know why companies do the "escort you out by security" thing, but I doubt there is a great deal of logic to it, as I have observed that even at a given company, some people are treated like that and some aren't, and there's no sense to it. It's never happened to me, but a former boss of mine was laid off that way, and nobody admitted to knowing why. Yes, he could have destroyed a lot if he'd wanted to, but so could a less senior employee.
Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
10% is huge by any measure.
By that logic no company with less than 11 people should ever fire anyone...
Firing one person in a 10 person company could mean that you lose your entire accounting/finance skillset in one fell swoop. Or your sole developer. It is a big deal in terms of intellectual property and skill pool within your organisation.
Down stream impact of how to cope with that loss is another factor. Fire your book keeper and does your remaining engineering team have to spend 10% of their time doing invoices and reconciling bank accounts?
Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 1x1 scenario still involves calling the laid off employees into meetings in sequence while everyone else stresses out wondering if they are next. Layoffs are brutal no matter what you do.
Not only that, but as someone who has been through this in the past... What happens is you find out your department or wing of the building is next. You continue to try to do your job, meanwhile your manager starts walking towards you and stops at a couple cubicles down from you. You breath a slight sigh of relief. Meanwhile you and everyone else is prairie-dogging as others in the office start getting called out, an…
My only experience with layoffs is when one morning we suddenly had a departmental meeting, and it turned out none of us was being laid off, but our manager of over a decade was, and he was already gone, no chance to say goodbye.
Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce
#189Some think you should do this annually. "Back when he was running GE, Jack Welch famously argued that leaders should fire the bottom 10 percent of their workforce each year, as part of an orderly continuous improvement process." https://www.inc.com/paul-b-brown/should-you-fire-10-of-your-...
Yep, the warped logic of stack ranking still infects HR thought to this day, in some quarters anyway. It's one of those notions that sounds brilliant at first, but then when you think it all the way through, it reveals itself as patently bizarre and misguided. As noted, it creates a really unhealthy intra-team sabotage mindset as everybody competes to avoid being at the bottom of the stack. It puts managers in a horr…
Sounds like all of the issues could be solved by just not being committed to 10%, moving to 5% or 2.5% as your workforce gets stronger. And spread the responsibility of choosing who to fire beyond single individuals, so a team of people is responsible for figuring out who is not contributing.
Re: SpaceX to lay off 10% of Workforce
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also a good way to get a disgruntled worker who still has system privileges or physical access to cause all kinds of havoc. Not worth the risk, even if you think it's more humane.
Not worth the risk? Disgruntled workers only generally arise if you treat your employees like shit and do shit like say, telling employees 'hey you might not have a job on monday but we're not telling you! we're gonna give you a weekend to think about your possible jobloss'. I honestly hope you never work in HR because your sort of attitude is genuinely disastrous to this industry. Acting like treating your employees…
I agree the mail thing is not great... but you’re saying that of the 600 employees who were laid off, not a single one of them will become disgruntled if they had a good work environment? I too despise HR practices in some instances, but I’d consider them extremely incompetent if they believed in collective goodwill of 600 people who just lost their jobs. Keeping their access to sensitive systems (in a rocket company, no less!) would be opening the company up to sabotage, and HR would be fully (and rightfully) blamed for it.
Also, if I were laid off, why would I want to continue working for them for two more weeks? I don’t care about the company’s success at that point. I’m already getting two months severance; it’s much better to focus entirely on finding a job as quickly as possible. Half a month’s paycheck is not worth the emotional pain of seeing your non-laid-off colleagues continue to live their normal life, but act all awkward around you.
In fact, I’ll go ahead and say: I think your attitude that requests laid-off employees to keep working is disastrous. Nothing about making them come to work is respectful or beneficial to them.